Pun Salad

This is (duh) a sequel to Nobody, which I watched and liked back in 2023. Bob Odenkirk stars again (spoiler for the first movie: he survives), and he's great. It is billed as a "dark comedy", where the darkness is provided with copious violence, bad language, and threats against the innocent. So, if you're OK with that…

The events of the previous movie have given Hutch (Bob) a promotion of sorts: he's now a professional assassin, working to pay off multi-millions in debt, thanks to his rash (but understandable) decision to burn up a large pile of mob cash. (It made sense at the time. You really should watch that first movie before this one.)

But it's a tiresome life, and Hutch has been neglecting his family. He demands a break for a family vacation, and chooses "Plummerville", a cheesy, decrepit town he remembers from his youth. It's got rides, a water park, an arcade, duck boats, … and (oh yeah) loads of corruption and organized crime; he wasn't aware of that last bit. But Hutch is a Jack Reacher-style character; trouble and (eventually apocalyptic) violence seem to find him wherever he goes.

I had to look over to IMDB to find the name of the actress playing the primary villain here. And said, "Oh. Wow."

Pun Son wanted to see Nuremburg! (He's kind of into WWII stuff.) So we trundled down to the Regal Cinemaplex in Newington Sunday night for the 8:15 showing, and … we were the only ones in the theater. The parking log was crowded though, thanks to the new Wicked movie.

Cynical observation: When it comes to actual wickedness, I guess there's not so much interest in movies about that.

It is, pretty clearly, Oscar-bait. I'm not sure how the "Best Actor" nomination will play out. Will both Russell Crowe (who plays Hermann Göring) and Rami Malek (who plays his shrink, Douglas Kelley) get nods? Will they then split the vote, allowing some mere mortal to take home the statuette? I'd say Michael Shannon (playing prosecutor Robert H. Jackson) is a lock for Best Supporting Actor, even though he goes through the movie with a single semi-scowl expression.

Also good: John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andrus, commandant of the Nuremburg prison and Leo Woodall, an occasional translator between Kelley and Göring, who's hiding a secret past.

It's very long, just a couple minutes short of 2.5 hours. And, if you want to know why I'm concentrating on the actors, most of that time seems to be those actors talking to each other. I may have nodded off for a bit in the middle.

The movie emphasizes how ordinary Germans (like Göring) got enraptured by the charismatic Hitler. At the end, spoiler alert, Kelley is shown as a depressed drunk, given to loudly, but futilely, warning fellow Americans that it would be a mistake to think It Can't Happen Here. Are we supposed to draw parallels between the Adolph and the Donald? I'd guess that wasn't far from the filmmakers' minds.

I loved the old Police Squad TV show. It only lasted for six episodes in 1982.

I watched the resulting movie series with Leslie Nielsen, in 1988, 1991, and 1994. My recollection: generally OK, but not as good.

And the latest installment in the resulting movie series was free-to-me on Paramount+, my Saturday night was free, so …

Well, the comedy dropoff continues. There's a lot of mugging for the camera. (One great thing about the TV show: Leslie Nielsen and Alan North were just about always deadpan.) There's a lot of absurdity that seldom manages to be actually funny. The best jokes are the ones stolen from the previous entries.

Anyway: Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Junior, trying to follow in Dad's footsteps. He's a parody of a cop who doesn't play by the rules, shooting first, asking (no) questions later, which puts him constantly at odds with his superiors. His billionaire antagonist, Richard Cane, is hatching a scheme to loose violent anarchy upon the nation, aided by a gadget named "Primitive Online Transmission", or a P.L.O.T device. (That actually got a grin from me.)

Pamela Anderson plays the love interest, who also is seeking revenge for her dead brother, sent to his doom by Cane. She's better than I would have expected!

Well, I thought I was going to like this better. I read and enjoyed the Parker novels by "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake pseudonym). The previous Parker movies (with, variously, Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Robert Duvall, …) have been uneven, but good enough so I was willing to take a chance on this one. Shane Black wrote and directed, and he's done good stuff in the past.

Mark Wahlberg plays Parker here. For those who don't know: he's a thief, operating under his own not-particularly-moral code of ethics. This requires him, occasionally, to hook up with a crew of fellow thieves. Among which, according to that saying, honor is lacking. The opening heist demonstrates that, as most of the team is betrayed and murdered by … no spoilers here.

But this sets Parker on a quest for revenge and retribution. Which turns into an unlikely, and unlikeable, Ocean's 11-style caper, but with ultraviolence, chase scenes, and a lot more bad words (well, just multiple repetitions of one bad word). It's very formulaic, and I kept dozing off.

Worst of all: the script turns Parker into kind of a wisecracker. That's not faithful to the books. In fact, this has the feel of a previously-existing script that someone demanded be turned into a Parker movie, and that was accomplished grudgingly, in a slapdash fashion.

Co-written and directed by Ethan Coen, half of the genius behind The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Blood Simple, etc.! What could go wrong? Especially since it's free-to-me on Peacock?

Well, I liked it OK, but only because I've inured myself to tolerate all the stuff you can read about in the IMDB "Parent's Guide". (Not everyone has the same attitude, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes are pretty brutal.)

Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private eye out in Bakersfield. Things kick off when a prospective client, Mia Novotny, is found dead from an apparent auto accident, her car busting through the guardrails on a lonely desert road. But Honey had promised to help Mia, so she feels duty calls on her to do at least a perfunctory investigation.

Which opens a can of worms. For example, Honey's led to the "Four-Way Church", run by a charismatic priest (Chris Evans), who's quickly revealed to be sleazy in multiple ways. (A total inversion of Captain America.) She makes the acquaintance of MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who manages the evidence room, and… that relationship develops pretty quickly.

Honey utters some very good lines that made me smile, straight out of the hard-boiled shamus handbook. The plot is twisty. (I had a lot of "I didn't see that coming" moments.) Things get personal when (near the end) Honey's niece goes missing. Given all the other bodies that have piled up at that point (this YouTuber counts eight in all) , Honey's more than slightly concerned.

Now, of course, I have that old Carl Perkins song stuck in my head.

So a long Friday night stretched ahead of me with a cheap Domino's pizza working its way through my alimentary canal… Hey, why not watch this year's Superman movie?

So I did, and it wasn't bad. It does some violence to the Supercanon I grew up with, but I can live with that.

It begins not with the usual origin story, but the aftermath of Superman getting badly defeated by the "Hammer of Boravia", an enemy motivated by Superman's previous intervention in Boravia's invasion of the poor, defenseless country of Jarhanpur. Luckily, super-dog Krypto saves Superman, dragging him (literally) to the Fortress of Solitude, where a small team of robots brings him back to health.

It's quickly revealed that villainous Lex Luthor is behind the scenes, and all this is merely a small element in his overall scheme to discredit and destroy the Man of Steel. And (as usual) gain enormous wealth and power.

It's fun. Just a few notes.

(1) One of the plot points involves Superman's DNA. Which made me wonder biologically: he's an alien from the doomed planet of Krypton, and he's got DNA?

(2) Pa Kent has a small but pivotal role, and he is played as an extraordinarily decent sort by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Ironically, Vince played one of the more evil bad guys in an episode of Justified, Glen Fogle. (Whose fate was memorably kind of amusing.)

(3) Nathan Filion plays Green Lantern, amusingly, as kind of a jerk. Hey, I've liked him since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a fun TV series that also launched the career of a guy named Ryan Reynolds.

As promised/threatened yesterday in my David Mamet f-bomb anecdote, I dropped a few bucks on Amazon Prime to watch this 2001 movie, which he wrote and directed. A star-studded cast! In addition to the names on the poster to your right, there's also Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, Patti LuPone, and Mrs. Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon. Nearly all on the wrong side of the law, and demonstrating that there is, with few exceptions, no honor among thieves.

It starts with a daring and successful jewelry heist, but kingpin Danny DeVito uses it as leverage to coerce master crook Gene Hackman into going after a bigger score. It is the fabled "one last job": a plane carrying a whole bunch of Swiss gold. (That's kind of a spoiler, sorry; we learn about the job solely from the characters talking obliquely about it. And not until it actually occurs do we realize: Oh, that's what they were talking about.

Mamet's dialog is also gold, of course. Are real-world bad guys clever enough to talk like this? I suppose if anyone would know, it would be Mamet.

I watched the original movie version back in 1981, and I liked it well enough to check out the associated novel. They were fine, but I would not have expected to see a remake of the movie in 2025. Yet, here we are.

The plot is pretty simple: Rami Malek plays Charlie, a CIA geek working in the bowels of Langley on computer security and cryptography issues. He's happily married to Sarah. Whose job takes her over to London, where she is murdered in a terrorist attack.

The CIA rapidly identifies the perpetrators, but is unwilling to bring them to justice, either legal or vigilante-style. So Charlie takes on the task himself, with woefully inferior qualifications for wet work in the field. Still…

It's nice to see Remi Malek play a (more or less) normal human protagonist. The plot is imaginative, and I stayed awake. On that score, it really helped that I remembered nearly nothing about the version I saw 44 years ago.

One possible gripe is the ending, which failed somewhat to satisfy my thirst for revenge on Charlie's behalf. There's also a climactic surprise plot twist, which, seen in sober retrospect, seems pretty contrived.

After more than 50 years, it's probably time to watch this again. Written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, sandwiched in between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. It's a little movie, non-epic, but nevertheless very watchable.

It's also Gene Hackman's movie. He disappears into the character of Harry Caul, a wizard with a singular talent for surveillance, recording conversations the participants would prefer kept secret. He is guilt-ridden over the horrifying results of a previous gig, but that has not dimmed his craving for snoopery. He's also somewhat paranoid, compulsive about his own privacy. But still very Catholic-religious. Which only makes the developments here more poignant.

The supporting cast is pretty good too: the "Director", an uncredited Robert Duvall, hires Harry to spy on his wife (Cindy Williams) to see if she's cheating on him. (Spoiler: she is, with Frederic Forrest.) The director is assisted, creepily, by Harrison Ford! While Harry's assisted by a gabby John Cazale! His obsessions wreck his romantic relationship with Teri Garr! He is betrayed by competitor Allen Garfield!

It ain't a feelgood movie, but I liked it anyway.

Please note the "2" exponent. That's how it shows up in the movie itself, I looked up the Unicode, and I think it looks cooler than just a bare "2".

I watched the previous movie in this series back in 2017 My report here, but I thought it was pretty good. Unfortunately, a major bright spot in that movie, the pride of Portland ME, Anna Kendrick, does not show up in this sequel. But the other bright spot, J.K. Simmons, does! Uh, briefly.

Oh, heck, this isn't much of a spoiler: Simmons' character, Ray King, gets pretty much killed right at the beginning, but he leaves a clue scrawled in pen on his arm: "FIND THE ACCOUNTANT". That's Ben Affleck, whose on-the-spectrum skills serve both to uncover financial skulduggery and other misbehavior. He also is pretty good at fisticuffs, gunplay, explosions, and fast driving. He must have picked that up from being, occasionally, Batman.

He gets help from his estranged, equally skilled hit-man brother, Braxton (Jon Bernthal). (Sorry, a spoiler from the first movie.) All this in support of a thin but complex plot involving a hit woman, her kidnapped child, money laundering, … I had a difficult time figuring that out.

The movie is very violent, but also funny in spots. The chemistry between The Accountant and his brother generates some chuckles.